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Rüdiger Schmitt

Peter Zieme

Von Gabain was particularly interested in the question of the extent to which the religious ideas of the Central Asian peoples had been influenced by Zoroastrianism or other Iranian beliefs, and this perspective is reflected in several of her publications.

Jean-Pierre Digard and Carol Bier

a hand-woven pile rug of coarse quality and medium size (90 × 150 cm or larger) characterized by an abstract design that relies upon open fields of color and a playfulness with geometry. This kind of rug is common among the tribes of the Zagros (Kurdish, Lori-speaking ethnic groups, Qašqāʾīs).

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Giuliano Lancioni

The significance of Gabrieli’s contribution was widely recognized. He was a national member of Accademia dei Lincei since 1957 and served as its president in the years 1985-88; from 1968 to 1977 he was president of Istituto per l’Oriente.

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Sheila S. Blair

plasterwork or stucco. Gypsum plaster has been used as a building material in Persia for more than 2,500 years. Originally it may have been applied as a rendering to mud brick walls to protect them from the weather, but it was soon exploited for its decorative effects.

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Kambiz Eslami

Following in the footsteps of his father, he began his career as one of Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah’s personal pages. He had already received the title amīn(-e) ḵalwat when he accompanied the shah on his second journey to Khorasan in 1883. His promotion to the position of chief musketeer in 1883-84 was followed by two other appointments.

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Kambiz Eslami

MOHAMMAD-EBRAHIM KHAN GAFFARI was the son of Farroḵ Khan Amīn-al-Dawla, a high-ranking Qajar official. He spent his early years in the inner circle of Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah’s court and then traveled to Europe to continue his education. In 1891 he received the title Moʿāwen-al-Dawla, and was named the head of the Commerce Court and deputy minister of justice.

Kambiz Eslami

NEZAM-AL-DIN GAFFARI was among the entourage of both Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah and Moẓaffar-al-Dīn Shah when they were touring Europe, during which he received a variety of decorations from European governments. In his later years, Ḡaffārī held several important positions, including the minister of mines, the minister of public services, and minister of education.

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Boris A. Litvinsky

(1908-1977), Tajik statesman, academician, and historian. His energy and administrative skills were instrumental in establishing Tajikistan’s first State University in 1948, and in inaugurating its national Academy of Sciences in 1951. He published more than 500 works in Russian, Tajik, and other languages.

Nassereddin Parvin

Hushang Aʿlam

There has been confusion or uncertainty about the nature (color, taste, odor, medicinal properties) of galbanum, the plants involved, and habitats. The confusion has resulted mainly from the similarity of galbanum to resins yielded by some other umbelliferous plants.

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Shahnaz Razpush and EIr

or QALYĀN (nargileh); a water pipe chiefly used in the Middle East and Central Asia for smoking tobacco. It is composed of several parts: the bādgīr (chimney); sar-e ḡālyān or sarpūš (the top bowl; sar-ḵāna in Afghanistan); tana (the body); mīlāb (the immersion pipe); ney-e pīč (hose); and kūza (the reservoir of water).

Willem Vogelsang

B. A. Litvinsky

: Iranian contribution and Iranian connections. The region of Gandhāra attained its peak of prosperity in the Kushan period (1st to 3rd centuries CE), when it became one of the strongholds of Buddhism.

Richard Salomon

Daniel Balland and Marcel Bazin

“wheat,” both the plant and the grain. Wheat bread has been the staple of local diets throughout Iranian plateau for millennia. A very broad range of bread wheat varieties has traditionally been grown in the Iranian lands, especially in Afghanistan.

Abbas Milani

Qasem Gani was a prolific writer and, during his many years abroad, corresponded with several eminent figures of the time. His diaries, notebooks, and letters have been compiled and edited in twelve volumes under the general supervision of his son, Cyrus Ghani.

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Nassereddin Parvin

Ganjaʾī owes his fame to his publication of the politico-satirical weekly Bābā Šamal in 1943-45 and 1947, which became one of the most popular satirical journals in the history of journalism in Persia. Thereafter, most of his colleagues, journalists, writers, and even public figures addressed him as “Bābā Šamal.”

Bernfried Schlerath

Ezzat O. Negahban

(cave) and Stone Age cave dwellers in Iran. Caves and rock shelters were particularly attractive living places for the hunter gatherers of the early Paleolithic period. The geographic situation of the Iranian Plateau with its bordering mountain system meant that there were many cave sites which would have been suitable for early cave dwelling man.

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Jean Calmard

(1807-9), a diplomatic and military project between France and Persia which represented Napoleon’s last attempt to realize his Oriental ambitions. From late 1795, Persia became part of French projects against British India. From the renewal of Franco-Ottoman relations (June 1802), he sought information on Persia.

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referring to a garden estate, intended primarily for pleasure rather than permanent residence or production of crops, formally laid out, usually incorporating architectural elements, such as ornamental pools, gate-houses, and pavilions.

Mehrdad Fakour

Lisa Golombek

Donald Wilber’s study of the Persian garden remains the most comprehensive, to which should be added the articles by Ettinghausen and Pinder-Wilson in the proceedings of the Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the Islamic Garden.

Howard Crane

Traces of Sultanate period gardens in the Persian style survive around Delhi in the citadel (Kōṭlā) of the Tughluqid Fīrūzšāh III (1351-88) and at Vasant Vihar (14th century). Mughal landscape architecture, which was characterized by terraced sites, čahārbāḡ plans, and raised walks, is perhaps most renowned for its dramatic and inventive use of moving water.

Borhan Riazi

Lisa Golombek

For the decorative arts, the “garden carpet” is the quintessential re-creation of the garden, while paintings depict the garden as a setting for events. Vegetal motifs as ornament may be understood as generic allusions to the garden. In special circumstances, these allusions may be viewed as allusions to paradise themes.

Daniel Balland

(Gardēz), a city in the Solaymān Mountains of eastern Afghanistan, 122 km south of Kabul. The city is situated at 2,300 m above sea-level, in a large intramountainous depression watered by the upper course of the Rūd-e Gardīz.

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HELMUT SLABY

In 1870, Nāṣer-al-Dīn Shah decided to make a pilgrimage to Karbalāʾ, and Gasteiger repaired and partially rebuilt the road via Hamadān and Kermānšāh to the Turkish border and also rendered the road from Kangāvar via Qom to Tehran usable.

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or GĀΘĀS; the core of the great Mazdayasnian liturgy, the Yasna, consisting of five gāθās, or modes of song (gā) that comprise seventeen songs composed in Old Avestan language, and arranged according to their five different syllabic meters.

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Amir Ismail Ajami

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Christian Bromberger

arranged fights between bulls. These now take place only in the Caspian provinces of Gīlān and Mazandarān. In the past, however, they were common throughout Persia and formed part of the entertainment in local festivities along with other games involving pitting animals and creatures of all kinds against each other.

Hiroshi Kumamoto

B. Grami, M. R. Ghanoonparvar

common term in Persian for several species of the genera Tamarix (desert trees) and Astragalus (spiny shrubs of gavan); also the name of a confection made with the sweet exudate (gaz-angobīn) produced on Astragalus.

Etan Kohlberg

François de Blois

J. T. P. de Bruijn

the most important Persian lyric, adopted also by literatures influenced by the classical Persian tradition, in particular Turkish and Urdu poetry. OVERVIEW of entry: i. History, ii. Characteristics and Conventions.

Gerhard BÖWERING

(variant name Ḡazzālī; Med. Latin form, Algazel; honorific title, Ḥojjat-al-Eslām"The Proof of Islam”), born at Ṭūs in Khorasan in 450/1058 and grew up as an orphan together with his younger brother Aḥmad Ḡazālī (d. 520/1126; q.v.).

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EIr

Xavier de Planhol, Roberta Giunta

or Ḡazna, Ḡaznīn; province and city in southeastern Afghanistan, the latter situated 136 km south of Kabul at an altitude of about 2,200 meters. The earliest known monuments of Ḡaznī belong to the Ghaznavid period (366-583/977-1187), the best representative of which are the two minarets standing east of the citadel, close to two large mounds resembling mosques.

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Willem J. Vogelsang

RÜDIGER SCHMITT

Geiger studied Hebrew and Arabic before being persuaded by Leopold von Schroeder to turn to Indian and Iranian studies. Among his teachers in Vienna, Bonn, Prague, Göttingen, and Heidelberg were the Indologists Leopold von Schroeder, Moriz Winternitz, and Franz Kielhorn and the Iranists Friedrich Carl Andreas (q.v.) and Jacob Wackernagel.

Bernfried Schlerath

Geiger’s first publication (1877) was an edited version and annotated translation of the Pahlavi version of the first chapter of the Vidēvdād, the first part of which was his doctoral thesis. Later in 1880 he published a translation with commentary of the third chapter.

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Bernfried Schlerath

Geldner’s first significant work appeared in 1874 while he was still a student, in the form of an answer to a prize essay question posed by the Philosophical Faculty at Tübingen. The essay was expanded and published in 1877 under the title Über die Metrik des jüngeren Avesta.

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HERMANN LANDOLT

Rudolf Gelpke was educated at the universities of Basel, Zürich, and Berlin. He became a noted writer in his early twenties, and his novel Holger und Mirjam was published in Zürich in 1951. His interests in the Islamic world began after a visit to Tunisia in 1952.

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Parviz Mohebbi

(Pers. ḥakkākī), the process of shaping and polishing faceted gemstones. The first-known reference in Persian to gem cutting is found in an anonymous treatise on jewelry, Jowhar-nāma-ye neẓāmī, written in 1195-96 under the last Ḵᵛārazmšāh. According to the sources, gem cutting and polishing were both done by the same machine—the grinding wheel or čarḵ-e ḥakkākī.

Tahsın Yazici

Stephanie Cronin

the first modern highway patrol and rural police force in Persia. The Government Gendarmerie (Žāndārmerī-e dawlatī) was established in 1910 by the second Majles and proved the most enduring in a series of official projects for the modernization of the armed forces under the leadership of foreign officers.

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Mahmoud Omidsalar

Michele Bernardini

an important port city in Liguria, in northwestern Italy, which during the Middle Ages played a significant role between Europe and the East, including Persia. Genoa was sacked by Muslim raiders from North Africa in 935 but became an economic and commercial power during the First Crusade (1096-1101).

Xavier de Planhol

The primordial component of the land of Iran, since it was a sedentary world as opposed to the nomadic Tūrān, must have been situated above the level of the internal steppes and deserts, in the highland river valleys having both arable alluvial soils and plenty of water from the rainfall in the mountains.

Xavier de Planhol

The territory of Tajikistan corresponds with the predominantly Iranian ethnic sector of the mountainous south-eastern periphery of the Bukhara emirate, which came under Russian influence at the end of the 19th century. Its southern and eastern borders with Afghanistan and China are the results of international treaties.

CYRUS ALAI

The world’s oldest known topographical map is a Babylonian clay tablet (ca. 2300 B.C.E.) found at Nuzi in northeastern Iraq. It is a relatively advanced picture map, showing two ranges of hills, as seen from the side, and the rivers they flank, by a series of parallel lines. The site covered by this map may have lain between the Zagros mountains and the hills running through Kirkuk.

Eckart Ehlers

This article is concerned with those aspects of the geology of Persia that are of immediate economic and cultural significance for the country and its inhabitants, primarily (1) geological structure and orohydrographic differentiation of Persia, (2) geology and natural hazards, and (3) geology and natural resources.

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Keith Hitchins

At a crossroads of great empires to the east, west, and north throughout their history, the Georgians absorbed and adapted elements from the cultures of diverse peoples, while at the same time defending their political and cultural independence against all comers. The Georgians are today distinguished by a unique cultural heritage.

Keith Hitchins

Between the Achaemenid era and the beginning of the 19th century, Persia helped to shape Georgian political institutions, modified social structure and land holding, and enriched literature and culture.

Gocha R. Tsetskhladze

Ancient Georgian tribes had close cultural contacts with Near Eastern civilizations from the 18th century BCE. Iranian elements appeared from the middle of the 2nd millennium B.C.E., as they did in the art of the entire Caucasian region.

Aleksandre Gvakharia

The tribes of Georgia had a well-established and vast literary tradition and folklore long before the Christian era. None of the pre-Christian Georgian literary works have survived, however. Christianity became established in Georgia as an official religion at the beginning of the 4th century, and in the 5th century the first surviving literary work was created.

Pierre Oberling

Many thousands of Georgians, Armenians, and Circassians who were transplanted to Persia by Shah ʿAbbās I (996-1038/1588-1629) were peasants, and they were settled in villages in the Persian hinterland.

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Ezat O. Negahban

a rich archeological site located in western Azerbaijan about 7 km south of the town of Urmia (Reżāʾīya) plain made known through the aerial survey of ancient sites in Persia carried out by Erich F. Schmidt in the 1930s.

Farhad Daftary

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Marcus Milwright

(lit. "making knot”), a form of geometric interlaced strapwork ornament that is commonly found in architecture and the minor arts throughout the Islamic world. In Persian Islamic architecture gereh-sāzī designs exist in a variety of media, particularly cut brickwork (bannāʾī), stucco, and cut tilework (mosaic faïence).

Oliver Bast

Dietrich Huff

The first Germans who reported on the historical and archeological monuments of the ancient Persian world, were, as in other nations, adventurers and travelers of a different kind. Their reports can be significant as contemporary descriptions of the condition of monuments in late medieval times, particularly those which have vanished or are seriously altered nowadays.

Oliver Bast

Hans Schiltberger, a Bavarian soldier, was the first German to give an eyewitness account of his travels in Persia. Initially captured by the Ottomans in 1396, he later became a prisoner of Tīmūr at the battle of Ankara (1402).

Jens Kröger

Until the 19th century, Persian works of art entered collections in Germany by mere chance. From then on, works of art from all periods of Persian history were collected systematically to acquire knowledge of the world and to educate and inspire artists and craftsmen. Collecting, exhibiting, and studying Persian art reached an unprecedented scale in the 20th century.

Christl Catanzaro

German culture was and is very highly appreciated in Persia, but its influence on Persian culture is usually overrated. A lasting influence was mainly exercised on Persians who either attended a German school in Persia, had other personal contacts with Germans, studied in Germany, or worked there.

Oliver Bast

The Germans in Persia who have risen to a certain prominence fall mainly into one or more of the following categories: a) travelers and explorers (see above); b) experts in the service of the Persian government; c) agents and soldiers; d) members of German institutions in Persia.

SHAUL SHAKED

William W. Malandra

(the fashioner of the Cow), a divine craftsman who figures prominently in the Gathas of Zoroaster but falls into obscurity in the Younger Avesta, being there associated with the fourteenth day of the month, known in Middle Persian simply as Gōš.

Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh

C. Edmund Bosworth

an Islamic dynasty of Turkish slave origin 977-1186, which in its heyday ruled in the eastern Iranian lands, briefly as far west as Ray and Jebāl; for a while in certain regions north of the Oxus, most notably, in Kᵛārazm; and in Baluchistan and in northwestern India.

Aloïs van Tongerloo

In addition to his demanding teaching responsibilities, Ghilain continued with his academic work at the University of Leuven. The commitment documents his intellectual stamina and iron will, as he had to travel by train between La Louvière and Leuven, even in the dark days of World War II when Belgium was under German occupation.

Laurianne Martinez-Sève

Ghirshman came from an affluent family in Kharkov and was enlisted in 1914 into the Russian army. In 1917, he joined the counter-revolutionary camp, and after the Communist victory took refuge in Istanbul, where he earned a living as a violinist.

C. Edmund Bosworth

There were at least three raids by the early Ghaznavids into Ḡūr, led by Sultan Maḥmūd and his son Masʿūd, in the first decades of the 11th century; these introduced Islam and brought Ḡūr into a state of loose vassalage to the sultans.

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Mina Marefat

or Heydar Ghiaï-Chamlou (b. Tehran, 1922; d. Cap d’Antibe, 1985), an influential pioneer of modern architecture in Persia and professor at the University of Tehran. Stylistically, his work was thoroughly “modern,” introducing aspects of the contemporary and International Style architecture of Europe and using new technology and materials such as aluminum.

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(1462-1541), scholar, philosopher, and motakallem (theologian) of the late Timurid and early Safavid period, and, for a brief interval under Shah Ṭahmāsb, one of two ṣadrs (chief clerical overseers). See DAŠTAKI, GĪĀṮ-AL-DĪN.

C. Edmund Bosworth

Michael Rogers

(1737-1794), author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1776-88). Relations of Persia and the later steppe nomads with the East Roman/Byzantine empire are an essential component of Gibbon’s celebrated history.

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EIr, Josef Wiesehöfer

in Persia. The following articles constitute a preliminary attempt at studying various aspects of gift giving in a chronological and historical framework, from the pre-Islamic era to the early modern period.

Willem Floor

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Marcel Bazin

Gīlān includes the northwestern end of the Alborz chain and the western part of the Caspian lowlands of Persia. The mountainous belt is cut through by the deep transversal valley of the Safīdrūd between Manjīl and Emāmzāda Hāšem near Rašt. To the northwest, the Ṭāleš highlands stretch a continuous watershed separating Gīlān and Azerbaijan.

Habibollah Zanjani

The first general census was carried out in 1956 and the sixth in 1996. The geographical boundaries and area have varied from one census to another; at the present time it is 14,819 square kilometers and includes 99 districts, 30 counties and 12 townships. In 1996, there were 2,700 settlements and 35 cities.

Ezat O. Negahban

The archeology of Gīlān, particularly in the pre-Islamic period, is usually studied in the wider context of the entire south Caspian region, including Mazandarān and Gorgān. Articles on three important locations, Marlik Tepe, Amlaš, and Deylamān, illustrate the perennial difficulties faced by archeological research in Persia.

EIr and Reza Rezazadeh Langaroudi

Sealed off by mountains from the rest of the country, political and social life in Gīlān had always been highly influenced, if not determined, by its geographical position. The history of 19th-century Gīlān began with the continuation of the binary division of Bīa-pas and Bīa-pīš and the rule of local families.

Pezhmann Dailami

Two classes featured prominently in Gilān as the driving forces of the revolution, and the alliance of these two, the peasantry and the urbanpetty-bourgeoisie of artisans, shopkeepers, and petty traders, was the hallmark of a radical movementon the southern shores of the Caspian Sea.

Manouchehr Sotoudeh

Most buildings of historical interest in Gilān have been repeatedly repaired and rebuilt. Some have clear records of their history, but most lack reliable, primary documents, and one has to rely on a variety of indirect evidence, such as the dates engraved on entrance doors or tombstones to reconstruct part of the past of a given edifice.

Donald Stilo

In Gīlān there are three major Iranian language groups, namely Gīlakī, Rūdbārī, and Ṭālešī, and pockets of two other groups, Tātī and Kurdish. The non-Iranian languages include Azeri Turkish and some speakers of Gypsy (Romany, of Indic origin).

Christian Bromberger

In the rice-growing regions of the Caspian hinterland, water requirements are considerable and irrigation requires careful organization. It is estimated that one hectare of rice, on average, requires 12,400 cubic meters of water. To meet this demand various techniques are used.

Christian Bromberger

In the north of the province, these minimal constructions (wells and rice barns) are traditionally complemented by a covered area for rice threshing, and, in Rašt district, by a separate building for drying paddy, known as a dudḵāna, garmḵāna, or bujḵāna. In the silkworm growing areas, the silkworm nursery occupies a place of honor in the enclosure.

Christian Bromberger

Each group living in the province is characterized by one or several specific production activities, so that an ethnonym refers as much to territorial, linguistic, and cultural roots as to any dominant professional specialization.

Christian Bromberger

Christian Bromberger

Even today, old women believe that cutting down an āzād tree is an act of sacrilege. Whether they are themselves objects of worship or simply grow near the tombs of saints, near cemeteries or inside mosques, these trees are places of devotion, each one dedicated to a specific type of wish (naẕr).

Christian Bromberger

In Gilan roles and tasks are distributed according to a more flexible pattern: to a large extent, women take an important part in agricultural work; in their homes, the line between male and female spaces is blurred; craftwork, industrial, and commercial activities are not the exclusive prerogative of men in this region.

Christian Bromberger

Chaff produces a great amount of smoke and was once used to punish miscreants or disobedient children who were locked up in the dud otāḡ (literally “smoke room,” where sheaves of rice were dried and cocoons stifled). This punishment was called fal-a dud (“the smoke from the rice chaff”).

Christian Bromberger

Gilān was a region that produced raw materials (including silk), to which one came for supplies, much more than a region where finished products were made; and the area long remained rural, with only minor importance accorded to towns housing professionals, workshops, and master craftsmen.

Christian Bromberger

Eating habits and culinary preparations in Gilān have several distinct characteristics. In this rice-producing region, the consumption of rice is much higher than elsewhere in Persia. Garden vegetables and kitchen herbs (sabzi) generally appear in the makeup of most dishes and give the regional cuisine the green touch that is its hallmark.

Nassereddin Parvin

Ina Baghdiantz McCabe

a compendium of reports collated as a journal by Petros di Sarkis Gilanentz (Gilanencʿ), which constitutes an important source for the history of events in Transcaucasia and Persia during the period March 1722 to August 1723, notably the Afghan invasion and siege of Isfahan.

Nassereddin Parvin

Farhang Mehr

In 1953, Giv created the Rostam Giv Charitable Foundation for the promotion of the education and welfare of the Zoroastrian community. In the same year, he encouraged his brother’s heirs to endow an elementary school for girls in Tehran. He also built sixty low-rent houses, equipped with modern amenities, for needy Zoroastrians.

Jamshid Sadaqat-Kish

a traditional footwear in Persia, mainly consisting of an upper part made of twined white cotton thread sewn up on the edges of a cloth and leather or rubber sole. The earliest known mention of the word giva is probably that in the Širāz-nāma (comp. ca. 1333) of Abu’l-ʿAbbās Zarkub Širāzi, where he mentions the bāzār-e giva-duzān (giva-makers’ market) of Shiraz.

Ezat O. Negahban

Eckart Ehlers

and ice fields in Persia. Due to Persia’s location in the very center of the arid dry belt, stretching from North Africa in the west to Central Asia in the east, and also due to its very specific topography, glaciers and/or permanent ice fields are restricted and concentrated in a very few locations.

Parvin Loloi

Jens Kröger

Glass blowing was invented in the Syro-Palestinian region during the Parthian period in the mid-first century B.C.E. and quickly spread from there to neighboring regions. Production of glass was much more widely spread within the Sasanian empire; it also became in both shapes and types of decoration independent from Parthian prototypes.

Willem Floor

Glass making has been known and practiced in Iran for about 3,500 years. Until about 1930 local glass making was done in small craft workshops. The raw materials needed for glass production abound in Iran except for soda ash, but this input will also soon be entirely domestically produced.

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Kurt Rudolph

in Persia. The current academic term gnosticism or gnosis goes back to the early Christian period and has a heresiological background; its representatives were called Gnostics, meaning people who believed in specific “insights” and ways of behavior that deviated from the official church and its teachings and who disseminated their beliefs through their own writings.

Tahsİn Yazici

A. D. H. Bivar

medieval township in Kermān province, located at 57° 29 E and 47° N, 70 km by road south of Kermān City (historical Bardsir) at the intersection of the medieval eastern highway and the route from Kermān to Bāft, Esfandaqa, and Jiroft.

Jean Calmard

Gobineau came from an old and well-established family from Bordeaux. His father Louis (1784-1858), a military officer, was for a time retained in Spain (1823-28), and the son’s education was left to his adventurous mother and her lover, Charles Sottin de la Coindière, who was Arthur’s private tutor.

Michael Alram

Gobl's mentor in studying numismatics was Karl Pink, whose methodology had a lasting influence on Göbl’s further academic career. One of Göbl’s most pressing aims was to try out Pink’s structural methodology of the minting of coins in the Roman Empire on other well-defined numismatic complexes.

Mary Boyce, A. D. H. Bivar, A. Shapur Shahbazi

T. Cuyler Young, Jr.

or GOWDIN TEPE; an archeological site in the central Zagros, which was occupied from ca. 5,000 to 500 B.C.E. located at 48° 4′ E and 34° 31′ N in the Kangāvar valley, approximately halfway between Hamadān and Kermānšāh.

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H. E. Chehabi

in Persia and Afghanistan. Named after the celebrated German poet and writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), the Goethe Institute was founded in 1951 in Munich as a non-profit organization for training foreign teachers of the German language.

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Hušang Aʿlam

Bruno Overlaet

Three pit graves, of which one was covered with flat stones, were found underneath the Iron Age III tombs. One contained a button base beaker and two comparable beakers were found between the Iron Age III tombs. This indicates the presence of Iron Age I graves at the site.

Layla S. Diba

lit. “rose and nightingale,” a popular literary and decorative theme. Together, rose and nightingale are the types of beloved and lover par excellence; the rose is beautiful, proud, and often cruel, while the nightingale sings endlessly of his longing and devotion.

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(1943-1974), poet and revolutionary figure whose defiant stand during his televised show trial, and subsequent execution by firing squad in 1974, enshrined his place in the cultural and political history of modern Persia. See GOLSORḴI.

Nassereddin Parvin

H. Ettehad Baboli

Among Gol-golāb’s best known songs are “Aḏarābādagān” and “Ey Irān”; the latter has become virtually the national anthem of Persia. Gol-golāb also composed Persian lyrics for the music of Georges Bizet’s Carmen and Charles Gounod’s Faust.

Hušang Aʿlam

rose water, a distillate (ʿaraq) obtained chiefly from the gol-e moḥammadi, the best-known product made from rose petals in Persia, widely used in sherbets, sweetmeats, as a home medicament, and on some religious occasions.

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Heinz Halm

lit. "exaggerators," sing. ḡāli; an Arabic term originally used by Twelver Shiʿite (eṯnā ʿašariya) heresiographers to designate those dissidents who exaggerate the status of the Imams in an undue manner by attributing to them divine qualities.

Munibur Rahman

(ca. 1522/23-1603), daughter of Ẓahir-al-Din Moḥammad Bābor, founder of the Mughal dynasty in India, half sister of Bābor’s successor, Homāyun, and author of Homāyun-nāma, the account of the reign of Homāyun.

Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak and Homa Katouzian

(b. Rašt, 1910; d. London, 1972), pen name of the poet MAJD-AL-DIN MIR-FAḴRĀʾI. Throughout the 1940s, Golčin sent his compositions to Persia for publication; many appeared in the literary journals of the period, such as Soḵan, Yaḡmā, Armaḡān, Foruḡ, Yādgār, and Jahān-e now.

Iraj Afshar

(b. Tehran, 1916; d. Mašhad, 2000), literary scholar, bibliographer, and poet. He held various administrative and judicial posts in the Ministry of Justice (1934-59). His considerable knowledge of literary manuscripts was later put to good use when he was transferred to the Majles Library, where he catalogued the Persian and Arabic manuscripts.

Jennifer C. Ross & James W. Allan

Persia possesses a number of gold sources—in the northwest (Azerbaijan and Zanjān), near Kāšān at the western edge of the central plateau, and, according to Strabo, in Kermān. Gold sources in Afghanistan are located in Badaḵšān, which is also the source region for lapis lazuli and, possibly, tin. The gold of the Āmu Daryā lies just north of Afghanistan.

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Elton L. Daniel

agreement arranged under British auspices to end the Russo-Persian War of 1804-13. The origins of the war can be traced back to the decision of Tsar Paul to annex Georgia (December 1800) and, after Paul’s assassination (11 March 1801), the activist policy followed by his successor, Alexander I.

Kambiz Eslami

a 16th-century treatise on the art of calligraphy, with brief biographical notices on a selection of past and contemporary calligraphers and artists, by the Safavid author and historian Qāżi Aḥmad b. Šaraf-al-Din Ḥosayn Monši Qomi Ebrāhimi.

Parviz AḏkāʾI

Daryush Pirnia with Erik Nakjavani

lit. “Flowers Program”; a series of radio programs on music and poetry, on the air for almost twenty-three years (March 1956 to February 1979), which aimed at illustrating the perennial thematic and aesthetic relationships between poetry and traditional music in Persian culture.

Hušang Aʿlam

Minu Yusofnezhad

or GOLPĀYEGĀN; a šahrestān (county) and town located in Isfahan province, bordered on the east by the county of Barḵᵛār and Meyma, on the south by Ḵᵛānsār county, on the north by the counties of Maḥallāt and Ḵomeyn (Central province), and on the west by Aligudarz county (province of Lorestān).

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Ahmad Kazemi Moussavi

, Ayatollah Sayyed (1899-1993), a chief figure in the contemporary Shiʿite clerical hierarchy (marjaʿiyat-e taqlid), who took a moderate stand in the opposition to what was considered the state’s disregard for Islamic principles in the name of modernization.

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Tahsin Yazıcı

(1900-1982), Turkish scholar noted in particular for his studies of the Turkish Sufi orders. He joined many Sufi orders without remaining in any of them for long. His greatest interests were in Shiʿism and the Mevlevi (Mawlawiya) order.

EIr

Abbas Milani

After private schooling at home, Golšāʾiān studied at the French-run Alliance Française and at the Dār al-fonun. In 1920, he enrolled in the new law school created by the Ministry of Justice (ʿAdliya). After completing the required courses in two years, he was employed at the same ministry.

Nassereddin Parvin

Kambiz Eslami

or Moraqqaʿ-e golšan; a sumptuous 17th-century album of paintings, drawings, calligraphy, and engravings by Mughal, Persian, Deccani, Turkish, and European artists in the Golestān Palace Library, Tehran.

John R. Perry

Hamid Algar

lit. "The Rose Garden of Mysteries"; a concise didactic matnawi in a little over a thousand distichs on the key terms and concepts of Sufism, which has for long served as a principal text of theoretical mysticism in the Persian-speaking and Persian-influenced world.

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Ḥasan Mirʿābedini and EIr

(b. Isfahan, 1938; d. Tehran, 2000), novelist who explored new literary techniques with each piece he wrote. He received the Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett award in 1997 via the Human Rights Watch Organization, and in 1999 he was awarded the Osnabrück Peace prize from the Erich Maria Remarque Foundation for his defense of freedom of speech.

Maziar Behrooz

(1943-1974), poet and revolutionary figure whose defiant stand during his televised show trial, and subsequent execution by firing squad in 1974, enshrined his place in the cultural and political history of modern Persia.

Shah Mahmoud Hanifi

or Gōmāl: a sub-province (woloswāli) and village in Paktiā province, eastern Afghanistan; a river originating in the Ḡazni province and flowing southeast through the Wazirestān tribal agency and the North-West Frontier Province, Pakistan; and a passage linking the eastern foothills of the Solaymān mountain range with the Indus plains.

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E. Ehlers, M. Momeni, and EIr, Habib-Allāh Zanjāni, Sheila S. Blair

(now referred to officially as Gonbad-e Kāvus) is the administrative center of the sub-province (šahrestān) of the same name and the urban center of the Turkman tribal area in northern Persia. It is named after its major monument, a tall tower that marks the grave of the Ziyarid ruler Qābus b. Vošmgir (r. 978-1012).

Marcus Milwright

the “Red Tomb,” completed on 4 March 1148, the earliest of five medieval mausolea located in Marāḡa in Azerbaijan. It combines elements of the two common forms of Islamic Iranian monumental tomb, the domed cube, and the conically-roofed circular or polygonal tower.

A. Shapur Shahbazi, Lutz Richter-Bernburg

in the Sasanian epoch, Gondēšāpur was one of the four major cities of Ḵuzestān, the other three being Karḵa, Susa, and Šuštar. The extensive irrigation systems developed there by the early Sasanians were probably aimed at supplying a large population.

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Rose L. Greaves

, General Sir (1832–1914), British intelligence officer, director of the Imperial Bank of Persia (Bānk-e šāhi-e Irān) from 1893 to 1914, author, and apparently the first person to use the term Middle East, which meant particularly Persia and Afghanistan.

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Multiple Authors

OVERVIEW of the entry: i. Geography, ii. Dašt-e Gorgān, iii. Population, iv. Archeology, v. Pre-Islamic history, vi. History from the rise of Islam to the beginning of the Safavid Period, vii. To the end of the Pahlavi era.

Ḥabib-Allāh Zanjāni

Eckart Ehlers

the designation of a steppe-region of approximately 10,000 km2 near the southeastern edge of the Caspian Sea, stretching for almost 200 km east-west between Morāva Tappa and the coast of the Caspian Sea near Gomišān.

Ḥabib-Allāh Zanjāni

Over the past four decades, the population of Golestān Province as a whole has increased 4.5 times, 8.5 times in the urban and 3.3 times in the rural areas. In the same period, the number of its cities has increased from 5 to 16.

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Muhammad Yusof Kiani

The Greek historian Arrian, recording Alexander’s expedition to the East, speaks of Alexander’s march to the city of Zadracarta, the largest town in the region and the capital of Hyrcania, where the royal palace was situated. It has been suggested that the present city of Gōrgān, formerly Astarābād/Estrābād, could possibly be the ancient Zadracarta.

A. D. H. Bivar

The area comprises two distinct climatic zones: the rainforest of the Alborz northern slopes and the Gorgān plain, well-watered and fertile close to the mountains but passing into increasingly desert steppe as the distance from the foothills increases.

C. Edmund Bosworth

formed in Sasanian and pre-modern Islamic times a transitional zone, a corridor, between the subtropical habitat and climate of Māzandarān to its west, and the arid steppes of Dehestān (q.v.) and, beyond them, the Qara Qum Desert to its northwest.

Jawād Neyestāni and EIr

Two characteristics dominated the history of Gorgān in the period between the 16th and early 19th centuries: incessant tribal unrest and power politics. These features reflected the rather particular tribal structure and the geopolitical situation of this region and its neighboring areas in the north and east.

Rudi Matthee

Mandana Zandian

(1935-2012),radio and television broadcaster, journalist, and the founder of several Persian radio and television networks, whose life and career unfolded in two distinct sociopolitical milieus, in Iran in the two decades that culminated in the Revolution of 1979 and in exile over the subsequent three decades of his life.

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Jalil Doostkhah

or gorza, gorz-e gāvsār/sar, lit. "ox-headed club/mace," a weapon often mentioned and variously described in Iranian myths and epic. In classical Persian texts, particularly in Ferdowsi’s Šāh-nāma, it is characterized as the decisive weapon of choice in fateful battles.

William W. Malandra

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Dagmar Riedel

Gottheil’s tenure at the New York Public Library (NYPL) is of relevance to the field of Iranian studies because he oversaw the development of its Near Eastern and Asian collections, first as Chief of Semitica and Orientalia (1897-1901), and afterwards as Chief of the Oriental Division.

Peter Avery

Gowharin came from an old and distinguished family which traced its lineage back to the eponymous founder of the Nurbaḵšiyya, Sayyed Moḥammad Nurbaḵš (1392-1464). Himself a Sufi of the Ḵāksār order, his interest in mysticism went far beyond that of an academic.

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Pierre Oberling

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D. N. Mackenzie

the Middle Persian development of an old Iranian compound adjective *gau-čiθra-, recorded in the Younger Avesta in the form gaočiθra-, as an epithet of the moon, “bearing the seed, having the origin of cattle” (or, “the ox”).

Denis Wright

Mohammad Dandamayev

Grantovskiĭ specialized in the history of ancient Iranian tribes (especially the Medes, Persians and Scythians) and their civilizations. His research was based on Akkadian and Urartian inscriptions, Iranian texts, and classical sources and on evidence of archaeology, ethnography, and folklore.

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Mortażā Momayyez, Peter Chelkowski

Broadly speaking, graphic art and design have a long history in Persia; their antecedents can be seen in graphic motifs and patterns on ancient clay and metal vessels, stone reliefs, seals, brickwork, glazed tiles, plaster and wood carvings, cloths, carpets, marquetry, miniature paintings, calligraphy, and illumination of manuscripts.

John Michael Rogers

Gray's initiation into eastern art, for which there was then no provision at any British university, came in 1928, when he worked for a season on the excavations at the great palace of the Byzantine emperors in Constantinople, followed by study in Vienna under Josef Strzygowski, who was, however, already sunk deep in diffusionism.

William W. Malandra

In 1921 Gray was appointed associate professor of philology at the University of Nebraska, where he remained until his appointment at Columbia University as professor of Oriental Languages in 1926. In 1935, he became Professor of Comparative Linguistics, a position he held until his retirement in 1944.

Multiple Authors

OVERVIEW of the entry: i. Introduction, ii. An Overview of Relations: Safavid to the Present, iii. British influence in Persia in the 19th century, iv. British influence in Persia, 1900-21, v. British influence during the Reżā Shah period, 1921-41, vi. British influence in Persia, 1941-79, vii. British Travelers to Persia, viii. British Archeological Excavations, ix. Iranian Studies in Britian, Pre-Islamic, x. Iranian Studies in Britain, the Islamic Period, xi. Persian Art Collections in Britain, xii. The Persian Community in Britain, xiii. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), xiv. The British Institute of Persian Studies, xv. British Schools in Persia.

Abbas Amanat

British imperial interests in Persia in the Qajar period were primarily determined by the concern for the security of colonial India and, secondarily, by trade, telegraphic communication, and financial or other conces-sionary agreements.

Charles Melville

British interest in, and scholarship on, Persia and Persian culture in the Islamic period goes back to the first formal contacts between the two countries, that is, at least to the 16th century and the growth of Britain’s involvement in the Levant and East Indian trades.

J. Michael Rogers

The collecting of Persian art in Great Britain goes back at least to the missions despatched by the Safavid Shah ʿAbbās I (1588-1629) and the activities of the Sherley brothers at his court in Isfahan. The early 17th century also saw the growth of trade with Persia through the East India Company.

F. Safiri and H. Shahidi

In the late 1930s, the British Government began to fund BBC broadcasts in languages other than English designed to counter anti-British broadcasts from Germany and Italy. The first were in Arabic, in January 1938, followed by Spanish and Portuguese to Latin America in March. Persian broadcasts followed in December 1940.

Gulnar E. Francis-Dehqani

This article will outline the major educational efforts of the British missionaries in Persia from 1871. The British schools in Persia were primarily founded by missionary organizations, most notably the Church Missionary Society (CMS).

Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin

The idea of Iranian origins of Greek philosophy had a legendary aura, either by declaring that Pythagoras had been Zoroaster’s pupil in Babylon, or by writing, as did Clement of Alexandria, that Heraclitus had drawn on “the barbarian philosophy.”

Mansour Shaki

After the conquest of Ionia, Lydia, and other regions of Asia Minor by Cyrus II, the Persians came into close contact with the Hellenes, their skilled artisans, renowned physicians, artists, statements, men-of-arms, and the like.

Reinhold Bichler and Robert Rollinger

Rémy Boucharlat

The influx of elements of Greek art into Persia during the Achaemenid period was primarily the result of the importation of artists and artisans from Hellenized Asia Minor and rarely due to a direct supply of objects.

Claude Rapin

The emergence of Greek art as a phenomenon following the expedition of Alexander the Great was a major cultural event in Central Asia and India. Its effects were felt for almost a thousand years, down to the early Islamic period.

Richard Davis

Three Persian verse romances of the 11th century stand out as significantly unlike other Persian verse romances, and they share enough features with the Greek Hellenistic Romances to suggest the existence of links between the two sets of tales.

Gül Russell

The question of Greek medicine in Iran is closely bound up with the history of Greco-Arabic medicine, which developed with the impetus of the “translation movement” between the 8th and the 10th centuries.

Rüdiger Schmitt

The Greeks came into direct contact with speakers of Iranian languages when Cyrus II conquered the Lydian empire in 547 B.C.E. However, the possibility of linguistic borrowings in prehistoric times cannot be ruled out.

Lutz Richter Bernburg and EIr

In the Islamic period, Persian learned literature was largely modelled upon Arabic antecedents and that these, whether translations from Greek or Arabic originals, strove to minimize foreign and unfamiliar-sounding vocabulary.

Philippe Gignoux

The arrival of Greek ideas and sciences in Iran have been traced through translated texts. However, there are allusions and references that we can glean from Pahlavi literature, and on occasion in longer passages where the closely related medical and philosophical theories of the ancient East indicate their origins in Greek or Indian civilization. Some of these references go back as far as the Achaemenid period too.

George Bournoutian

After graduating from Moscow University with a degree in literature and law, Griboedov first joined the military and then the diplomatic service. Griboedov joined the Russian administration in Transcaucasia in early 1819 and was sent by the Chief Administrator, General Ermolov, to Persia to establish the Russian Mission in Tehran.

Hengameh Fouladvand

(Mārcos [better known as Marco] Grigoriān, b. Kropotkin, Russia, 5 December 1925; d. Yerevan, 27 August 2007), Iranian-Armenian artist, actor, teacher, gallery owner, and collector who played a pioneering role in the development of Iranian modern art.

Rüdiger Schmitt

Jacqueline Calmard-Compas

(b. Aubais, Gard, France, 1885; d. Paris, 1952), French historian who based his wide-ranging research on the studies of the leading French orientalists of his time, and wrote works of synthesis on various aspects of Oriental history and culture.

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Rüdiger Schmitt

(Encyclopaedia of Iranian Philology; Strassburg, 1895-1904, reprinted Berlin and New York, 1974), the first attempt to summarize the knowledge of all subjects concerning Iran — the languages and literatures, history and culture of Iran and the Iranian peoples — that had been achieved by the end of the 19th century.

Rüdiger Schmitt

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Mina Marefat

(b. Istanbul, 1900; d. 1970), Armenian avant-garde architect, an influential figure in the development of modern architecture in Persia, linking Persian architects with Europe’s pioneers of the modern movement.

Erich Kettenhofen

For Iranian studies, Guidi’s most valuable discovery was the chronicle of an anonymous Nestorian Christian written in Syriac. It contains otherwise non-attested details of late Sasanian history from the death of Hormizd IV to the fall of the Sasanian empire. Guidi soon recognized the significance of the synodal records of the Nestorian church towards reconstructing the administration of the Sasanian empire.

Sebastian P. Brock

an anonymous, 7th-century chronicle of Nestorian Christians, known also as “the Khuzistan Chronicle,” written in Syriac and covering the period from the reign of the Sasanian Hormizd/Hormoz IV (579-89) to the middle of the 7th century and the time of the early Arab conquests.

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Anne Draffkorn Kilmer

One of the early investigators of the reconstruction of ancient Babylonian musical scales and music theory, she was the first scholar to explore and explain the musicological significance of the sequence of number-pairs of musical strings in a cuneiform text of the first millennium B.C.E. excavated at the archaeological site of Nippur in southern Iraq.

Mahmoud and Teresa P. Omidsalar

Gavin R. G. Hambly

Lawrence G. Potter

the final conflict, which was initiated with United Nations authorization, by a coalition force from 34 nations against Iraq, with the expressed purpose of expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait after its invasion and annexion on 2 August 1990.

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Pierre Oberling

D. N. Mackenzie

comprises a group of similar North-west Iranian dialects which includes that of Kandula, 25 miles north-north-west of Kermānšāh, and Bāǰalānī, in the region around Zohāb and Qaṣr-e Šīrīn, with an offshoot among the Šabak, Ṣārlī, and Bāǰalān (Bēǰwān) villages east of the city of Mosul in Iraq.

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Jean During

lit. "corner" or "part"; a term in Persian music designating a unit of melody of variable importance, which occupies a special place in the development of one of the twelve modal systems (dastgāh or āvāz).

Peter Jackson

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a district of what was in early Islamic times eastern Khorasan, now roughly corresponding to the northwest of modern Afghanistan, adjacent to the frontier with the southeastern fringe of the Turkmenistan Republic. See JOWZJĀN.

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Dietrich Huff

Jean-Pierre Digard, Gernot L. Windfuhr

generally referred to by the term kowli in Persian, seemingly a distortion of kāboli, that is, coming from Kabol, the capital of Afghanistan. It is not at all certain, however, that all the groups referred to as kowli are authentic gypsies; nor that only the groups referred to as kowli should be considered as gypsies.

Jean-Pierre Digard

Almost everywhere in Persia there are groups with characteristics similar to those of the Gypsies, but they are called by different names, sometimes designating their geographic or ethnic origin, sometimes their social status, and sometimes their profession.